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BEEF (a la Polonaise)
Mix some bread-crumbs with minced onion, a little butter, pepper and salt. Get a piece of beef, about four or five pounds, trim neatly, and insert the above stuffing into incisions made in the meat. These incisions should not be through, or the forcemeat will fall out into the stewpan. Put the meat into a stewpan, with a little butter and very little water, and stew until tender. Thicken the gravy with a tea-spoonful of brown thickening; or, failing this, with a quarter of an ounce of butter rolled in flour. Time to stew, three hours. Probable cost, 4s. 6d.
A pot roast with pockets of onion stuffing, from the era when a 4-5 lb joint cost four and sixpence. The method is sound; the details need translating.
- The hinge: shallow pockets, not tunnelsThe instruction that matters is the one the recipe spells out — cut the incisions partway into the meat, never through it. Deep slits let the crumb stuffing wash out into the pan, as the text warns. Pockets of a couple of inches, packed and pressed closed, should hold their shape through three hours.
- Choosing the jointNo cut is named, which in a Victorian kitchen meant the cook knew what a three-hour stew wanted. Use chuck, top rump, brisket or silverside — a collagen-rich cut that rewards long moist heat. A lean roasting joint of the same weight will be dry and grainy after three hours.
- "Very little water"Closer to a braise than a boil: the recipe wants the liquid shallow in the pan rather than anywhere near covering the meat, so that the joint largely steams under a tight lid. A cupful or so for a 5 lb joint, topped up only if the pan threatens to go dry.
- Brown thickeningA Victorian standby: flour cooked in butter or dripping until nut-brown, then kept in a jar for gravies. The recipe's alternative — butter rolled in flour — is beurre manie, uncooked rather than browned, and thickens without the toasted flavour: a quarter ounce is about a half tablespoon of butter, kneaded with an equal volume of flour and whisked into the simmering gravy in pieces.
- Stovetop or ovenThree hours over direct heat needs a heavy pan and the lowest possible flame, with occasional checking. A covered casserole in a 300F oven does the same work without attention and with less risk of catching.
- Bread-crumbs and butterUse dry or day-old crumbs, not fresh soft ones, or the stuffing slumps. About a cup of crumbs to a small finely minced onion and an ounce of butter is enough for a 5 lb joint; softening the onion in the butter first is optional, and gives a mellower result than raw onion.
- Doneness and yieldThree hours is a guide, not a rule — the joint is ready when a skewer slides through the thickest part with no resistance, which can take three and a half hours on a thick brisket. A 4-5 lb piece serves six to eight, sliced across the pockets so each portion shows the stuffing.
The name is a nineteenth-century menu convention rather than a claim of Polish origin: à la polonaise attached itself to a scatter of dishes, most familiarly vegetables finished with buttered crumbs, chopped egg and parsley, and the buttered crumb here is probably why the label stuck. Cassell's, first issued in the 1870s and reprinted for decades, was written for a broadly middle-class readership, and the closing "probable cost" line — a habit of the book throughout — was a budgeting tool for the mistress of the house rather than an aside. Stuffing incisions in a large joint is much older than the name; larding and forcing meat with seasoned crumbs or fat was a long-established European cookery technique for lean, tough cuts well before the Victorian kitchen adopted it, and it did two jobs at once, stretching an expensive joint and seasoning it from the inside out.